Blog

Professor Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology

Dr. Sarah Jane Moore, Independent Creative Artist 

We acknowledge the Aboriginal Countries that Sarah Jane and I work on, learnt on, live on and pass through and we show gratitude to the traditional custodians, the kin and Countries that have guided our research. Sarah Jane Moore’s writing acknowledges the Connecting to Country teachings of Oomera Edwards, Elder and Educator and pays homage to the language teaching of Auntie Iris Reid. The use of Wiradjuri concepts assisted Moore to story deep and ancestral notions of Country and place through the worlding of an Aboriginal child

The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants, and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air, to the composting earth, to the nourishment of insects and trees and kin, ceaselessly spreading out of itself as well as breathing the world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends

– David Abraham (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, page 46.

Jean Luc Nancy (1997) acknowledging we are beings-in-common recognises our coexistence in the world with others and Marisol de la Cadena (2015) drawing on her work with Indigenous peoples in the Andes proposes we exist in the world as ‘more than one – but less than many’. This is the starting point the Posthuman child – a disrupting force for troubling child/hood-nature binaries – in this story child is nature, with critters in a worlding becoming as relational possibilities. Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils—all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and wagging tails and tumbling streams—these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied—whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. The color of sky, the rush of waves—every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting—with Thunder, with Gum, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished – Drawing from and adapting – David Abraham (1996)

In  a modern eurocentric world with in the microcosm of human life we created in our cities we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation, given our age-old reciprocity with the complex assemblages of our landscape.

Sympoiesis is how we are naming the shared experience of ‘sensology’. Sympoiesis means making with. It describes the complex relations that produce life, dynamism, responsiveness, situatedness, entanglement, relationality.  Sympoiesis supports a view of humans as interdependent of all ecological beings, objects and weathering of the earth with the concept of ‘ourself’ being determined by a world that lies beyond the illusory borders of our bodies. Bodies are porous and open attributing the qualities of a shared life through sensorial knowing. As we pick and unpick together in dialogue what it means to have a porous body Sarah Jane notes sympoiesis is congruent with Aboriginal ways of encountering and taps into old stories and old ways of seeing spirits, animals and spirits as co-existing. Ingold (2013) reminds us to consider not limiting materiality to the surfaces of the landscape or objects but to acknowledge the centrality of the weather/ing, the air, the atmosphere of the world.

At the time of our research the two children were inbetween 1 and 3 years old.  One child was Aboriginal, Budya which is Wiradjuri for ant.  The other non-Aboriginal child Wren, was named after the  common songbird living with her.  The research drew on a model of posthumanist ecological communities where human and nonhuman are beings in common. It embraced an approach where Country, or the entity that is land was regarded as always in relation with all bodies, even if the knowing body was not attuned to notice these relations . The Aboriginal child, land and story was traced as a being in common with an identity, a past, a present and a future to be listened to, mapped, theorised and imagined. Walking on Country for the Aboriginal child, brings Aboriginal perspectives into engagement and encounters with the social world. In this way postqualitative/posthuman readings of Country acknowledged the presence, the lived space and dynamism of walking with, and in, and of, the land.

We loosely call our research as a place based postqualitative/posthumanist inquiry. Postqualitative/posthuman researchers support that knowledge is based not on unchallengeable truths existing outside of humans and nonhumans but knowing and being is relational – this approach builds on an onto-epistemological view that is all knowing is entwined, entangled with being. We cannot know the world without being in the world, we cannot be in the world without knowing it.  There are a number of methods and approaches that fit within the post-qualitative/posthuman paradigm we adopt, the focus of these practices is to acknowledge the world is not just ‘out there’ waiting to be interpreted, but is ‘in here’,  ‘in us’ ad with ‘us’ us being all the relations that inform our being and knowing of the world. This process of knowing and becoming intimate and attuned to a lively world including weathering worlds is what we call worlding. The children in our study are worlding. Our research methods are acquainted with the process of capturing that worlding. Walking methodologies figure centrally in our study and we take from Aldred (2014) who writes: “To move through a landscape is to dwell in the movement, to experience being with and connected to” (p. 31). Walking as method is central to our shared sense making. Noora Pyyry calls this walking as intra-action ‘a sensorium in action’.  It is through sensorial bodies, bodies sensing and recognising other bodies that sense making is activated.

The three to five-minute video captures have been gathered on mobile phones as Budya  and Wren go about their everyday worlding. Sensing ecologically is a concept we are using in order to imagine how children can engage/communicate with the more-than-human-world prior to human abstract language acquisition. That is, how they (human) come to find ways to be with nonhuman animals; plants; the weather; water; and materials. Embarking on this research there was a need to be attentive to the very subtle encounters nuances and gestures of sensing bodies.

Walking-with and through environments provides opportunities for children to encounter the materiality of spaces, to be with objects, intra-act and co-create sensorial, nature based knowings. Walking-with and through the children’s sensorial body means that we know as we go (Ingold 2010). Living in and being with the world according to Ingold (2013, p. 29) means we encounter “a lifetime of intimate gestural and sensory engagement”.  This thinking supported the children to be storied as sensing bodies and in particular the Aboriginal child to become with the aliveness of Country

The Gudhang (ocean) is our friend

The Madhan (tree) is our partner

The Walang is our tool for thinking.

The Gidyira (kin) is our teacher.

The land is our Gunhi (mother).

The land beneath us is alive (Moore, 2019).

The theoretical framing of this research is supported through a form of diffractive theorising drawing on a relational ontology. Barad (2007) states that while diffraction apparatuses help us: “… measure the effects of difference, even more profoundly they highlight, exhibit and make evident the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world, including the ontology of knowing. In fact, diffraction not only brings the reality of entanglements to light, it is itself an entangled phenomenon” (Barad, 2007, p. 73)

As a ‘re-turning’ like composting we are diffracting our data drawing on an emerging ‘posthumanism and vital materialist turn’ that supports a shift in focus, from culture as outside of nature, to a re-orienting of relations where the human and more-than- human world are recognised as existing in an ecologically ‘messy entanglement’.          The research employs the potential of posthumanist and includes Aboriginal child centred ways of Knowing, Being and Doing (Martin, 2003) through encounter. The theorizing is seeking to critique classic humanism, an approach that emphasizes only the value and agency of humans to the detriment of the agentic potential of the more-than-human world. Through the import of de-centering the human we are enticed to question the centrality of the human and to reconsider the way humans (in this case very young children) could encounter, the more-than-human world through their sensorial knowing rather than an intellectual or language based humanist knowing. In the paper we focus on Gidyira (kin) and Walang (stones).  These aren’t labels, categories or themes; they are concepts through which our overarching conceptual frame bodies sensing ecologically comes is enlivened.

The following  is a shared multispecies ethnography between Gidyira (kin) and Wren written by Karen published in Malone and Moore (2019) .

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Gidyira and Wren

 

Child-worlding bodies attuning to the ongoing. The relationality of an everyday multiple knowing. A present and past body sensing as entangled matter. There is a moment, a pause, a silence, recognition of ecological kin tracings, like tendrils of a floating sea jelly, rising and falling in the waves they pulsate in the everyday. Worldings of imaginaries.  According to  Haraway (2008) the world is constantly done and undone through ‘encounters’ which are not always those we expect. Touch ramifies and shapes accountability how living as relating engages bit pleasure and obligation. Touch is world making By attending to Haraway’s (2016) notion of relational natures of difference, I use a diffractive lens to be responsive to patterns that map not where differences appear but rather to map where the effects of difference between Wren and her companion

rollings over

rollings over

encounterings

mimicry

free

grasses

greening

stretching

scratching

bodies

shadowing

deepening

recognition

grasses greening

grasses greening

not only

entwined

joys

tangled

knowing

rollings over

rollings over

kin

As researcher of Wren noticing attunes me to this world otherwise left unrecognised, connecting beyond bodies allows a deep knowing, recognition; a sensing of bodies ecologically it forces us all into a new kind of relational ontology – human child who thinks with and through Gidyira (kin) with dog. Child-dog entwined in the joy of being animal. Child body mimics rollings over through her body with the dog, being with grass in the sunny field of an urban park. She looks to see ‘are we still worlding this moment together’, then continues on. The dog looks to her and notices ‘we are being together in our grassy rollings over’ and begins rolling over some more.

“Companion species” writes Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble are “relentlessly becoming-with. The category companion species helps me refuse human exceptionalism and invoke versions of posthumanism. In human-animal worlds, companion species are ordinary beings-in-encounter in the house, lab, field, zoo, park, truck, office, prison, ranch, arena, village, human hospital, forest, slaughterhouse, estuary, vet clinic, lake, stadium, barn, wildlife preserve, farm, ocean canyon, city streets, factory, and more.”

The diversity of my sensory becommings, a spontaneous convergence with the things I encounter, ensures an interweaving between my body and other bodies—this magical moment permits me, at times, to feel what others feel. The gestures of another being, the rhythm of her voice, and the stiffness or bounce in her spine,  gradually drawing my senses into a unique relation with her, into a coherent, if shifting, organization. And the more I linger with this other this entity that is animal, that is dog, the more coherent the relation becomes, and hence the more completely I find myself face-to-face with another intelligence, another center of experience that is part of my body now, tracings left behind. A quarter of a billion years ago the earth went through a period called ‘the great dying’. An extinction event where ninety-six percent of the species of plants and animals on the planet were lost, it nearly ended all life on the planet. Humans and all nonhuman species currently living on the planet are descendants from that surviving four percent of life. These “Ghosts point to our forgetting, showing us how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces”

Through encounters with Gidyira (kin) we search for entangled tracings of past, present and future worldings, these  moments of sensorial opening captured by the video episodes are spaces to be with the world beyond humanist limits, that thwarted my entering into a living relation with the expressive character of all things.

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Multi-species Co-habitation comes with a sense of responsibility when we are kin together we also must care and have shared sense of belonging and responsibility for our human non human kin. The child-more than human intra-action and cohabitation provides a space for mutual reciprocity, care and protection, to be thrown together, to be living well together means animating the posthuman predicament developing mutual reciprocity, care and protection, Living well together, being worldly with kin (Malone, 2018).

Sensing ecologically embraces bodies communicating with nonhuman entities: animals; plants; the weather; air; water; and sprits. The sense of the world is the touching of bodies each against the other, a touching sensed ecologically in different ways by different beings and different species of beings. Meaning through bodies; sensual knowing emerges as the means for making sense of entities, in the act of sensing.

As an ecological researchers and early childhood educators we are exploring the potential of a wild worlding exchange between bodies as sensorial openings and the things that engage them. Engaging with the writings of Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) where the child is emergent in a relational field, “a space in which non-human forces are equally at play and work as constitutive factors in children’s learning and becomings” (p. 257).  Challenging “anthropocentric ways of seeing and doing analysis of educational data” (p. 257). Looking for pedagogies outside of learning that is observation and language focused.  We are seeking to disrupt and unlearn pedagogical practices that focus on naming the world, engaging with predetermined objects or phenomena that are structured with limited sensorium possibilities. We propose instead a pedagogy of noticing and attuning to a young child’s sensorial ecological encounters. Bodies sensing ecologically allows for a pedagogy of walking, slowing, deepening, foraging and attuning as pedagogical practice. This work requires an unlearning of anthropocentrisim, a troubling of the privileging of language, text as central to child body knowing – it is a coming together with critters, a staying with the trouble . “Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale, it is a ‘sympoietic tangling … earthly worlding and unworlding”. (Haraway 2016).

This blog draws on a paper published by Sarah Jane and Karen titled: Sensing Ecologically through Kin and Stones in a 2019 Special issue of the  International Journal of Early Childhood and Environmental Education focusing on Precarious Times: Posthumanist Possibilities for Early Childhood Environmental Education.

References

Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage Books.

Aldred, J. (2014). Past movements, tomorrow’s anchors. On the relational entanglements between archaeological mobilities. In J. Leary (Ed.), Past mobilities: Archaeological approaches to movement and mobility (pp. 21-48). Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

de la Cadena, M. (2015) Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525-542. DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2010.500628

Ingold, T. (2010). Bringing things to life: Creative entanglements in a world of materials. National Centre for Research Methods, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. London: Routledge.

Malone, K. (2018). Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking sustainability and child friendliness in cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.

Malone, K and Moore, S.J., (2019). Sensing Ecologically through Kin and Stones, International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7(1), p. 8-25.

Moore, S. J. (2019). Intercultural story sharing in Guam. The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 17(2), 30-39.

Nancy, J. L. (1997). The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Walking-with is a time-travel-hopping (Barad 2017) in the embodied material labour of cutting through/undoing colonialist thinking in an attempt to come to terms with the unfathomable violence of repeated colonialization, genocide and destruction.  The trumpet plays the masculine Anthropocentric salute, while a host of onlookers have their troubling chatter silenced.  They will not talk of the radiation, the nuclear bombs, the polygon, the teachers and UNICEF staff tell me. Yet in these openings of walking-with pedagogies the child-earth bodies walking with me share, haunting stories of fear, fascination and body radiation occupation.

It is 2014, I am travelling to Semipalatinsk a city on the outskirts of the Polygon nuclear test site on the ‘Steppes’ in eastern Kazakhstan. After flying to Ust Kamenogorsk I am now traveling the 400 kilometres to the city via an old Russian taxi. Half way along our journey the driver pulls over to a dusty gas station. I decide to wander inside the small station shack to purchase some water.  Once inside I encounter a mother with a small child, a number of old men standing behind the counter all are looking towards the back of the room. In the corner of my eye I see a man dressed in a white onsie suit and face mask. He holds an apparatus, I realise it is a Geiger counter.  He motions me to come forward. I stand nervously, sweat beads start to accumulate on my lip as the beep, beep, beep runs across my body. I close my eyes and imagine laser beams flashing on radioactive particles that are currently crashing colliding violently and destroying delicately balanced cells. Laying silent hiding themselves deeply, dormant– the machine stops. I open my eyes; the man waves me on. I am done – I move to the door  – the water can wait – a set of fear stricken eyes are following my body, it is the young child held closely by her mother, waiting to be scanned – as I open the door dust sweeps across my face, particles settle deeply in my nostrils. I blow my nose.

Walking-with children on blasted landscapes, means walking-with to notice, attune with sensorial knowing as bodies sweaty, heavy lifting with/through the unknowing. Monsters walk with us – helping us to notice landscapes of entanglement, bodies with other bodies, time with other times (Tsing et. al., 2017). Children take me walking with on toxic blasted radiated landscapes.  Afterwards I write children recognize the fragility and porosity of human and non-human life and its link to the contaminated earth. Kazakh indigenous and settler children walking on landscapes speak of dust, dirt, thick uneasy air, toxic radiation. Walking with children allows for deep relational knowing, we talk through with and being in place; place walking becomes our shared rhythm; the children bring me into their place. We take some photographs, I allow some words to resonate, turning over and over I re-turn to them and write then down when I am alone some time later. I concentrate on being present, a co-presences of beings-in-common; children worlding with the ignorant unknowing stranger, Donna Haraways ‘modest witness’.

Historically, the territory of Kazakhstan was mostly inhabited by nomads. The imaginary of the nomadic body is one of being unlocatable, always moving with and entangled in the weathering landscape (Wuthnow, 2002). Until the sixteenth century, the nomadic Kazakhs had evolved as three jüz or territories. But repeated colonization, genocide and apartheid as shared with similar storying of indigeneity around the world, the Kazakh nomad was capturing by external powers whom were set to colonize the ‘empty’ spaces.  By the mid-eighteenth century, in order to fend off the threatening Kokand Khanate and facing encroachment from Tsarist Russia to the north and advancing Chinese armies in the east, the Kazakhs accepted Russian ‘protection’ in 1822. By the mid-nineteenth century, all of Kazakhstan were consumed within the Russian Empire. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganized several times before becoming the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. During the 1930s and 1940s Kazakhstan experienced population inflows of millions of exiled humans from the Soviet Union, deportees were interned in large labour camps, many of these were in the region of Ust Kamenogorsk and Semipalatinsk. In 1947, two years after the Second World War ended, the USSR’s main nuclear weapon test site the Semipalatinsk Test Site was founded near the city of Semey.  Over 460 atomic bombs were detonated at this site over a 40-year time frame. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan declared independence on the 16th December 1991. At the time of the Soviet Union collapse only 40% of the population was indigenous Kazakh, the Kazakh language had all but been abandoned and most Kazakhs were living in adjunct poverty and desperation in regional towns that were due to the expansive Russian industries and mining that scarred the landscape and the atmosphere were highly polluted from toxic chemicals.  Independence also meant Kazakhstan inherited 1410 nuclear warheads and the highly contentious Semipalatinsk nuclear weapon testing site. By April 1995, Kazakhstan had repatriated its nuclear warhead inventory back to Russia and, by July 2000, had destroyed the nuclear testing infrastructure at Semipalatinsk. During a 50-year period millions of adults, children, animals and birds had been exposed to high levels of nuclear radiation and radioactive pollution.

To attend to, and be affected by the uneasy childearth encounters through walking in the streets of Semipalatinsk, is to recognise the porosity of matter, past radiation, pesticides, and heavy metal in our waters, dust, air, bodies –  playgrounds of unknown possibilities,  as everyday catastrophic encounters that have been, and continue to be, the monsters walking with us.

Walking-with our shared bodies on flat dirty dusty earthy street Anna remarks:  “I love mountains because there are no mountains in our city. I love nature and animals. I would like to walk in the mountains, which would be interesting. And I would want to dance because of being happy to be walking and breathing fresh air and away from the radiation of the polygon”. 

The theoretical frame informing this walking emerges from the unravelling of an ontology of human exceptionalism, the ‘western capitalist human story” of mastery and manipulation of particles that now lay scattered across the thin skin of the landscape, re-turning in temporal diffractive reconstructions. Single particles coexist in different space time. As a troubling relational ontology, the notion of the posthuman disrupts a persistent ‘humanist’ paradigm by allowing new conversations to emerge. Where were we you might ask, while military, corporations and machines metastasized into monstrous creatures of capitalism, and at what point did we ignore/become deaf to the clarion call of the Anthropocene? There has been critique from many in regard to the naming of the Anthropocene because of its universalist nature. Universalism produces an assumption that we (humans/nonhumans) are all in this equally together. This universalizing of the human predicament neglects to acknowledge the ways in which wealth, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, age, location and so on mediate our relationships with the planet. As a disrupting, diffractive ontological tool posthumanism  has the potential to reveal there is no homogenous/universal species and the scale and impact of ecological damage is always unequal, unethical and unjust; indigenous  colonialised peoples, woman, children, and the other-than-human species we share this planet with are in it more than those entrenched in dominant western white masculine cultures.

As a diffractive theoretical thread this walking with children brings the past, the present and the future together walking as encounters with the ruinations of a precarious monstrous planet (Barad 2017b, Tsing et. al 2017).  This walking is far from the leafy green streets of Melbourne where I live. Where backpacks and children chatter and walk swiftly, kicking Autumn leaves.  Seductive simplifications of industrial production have rendered most blind to monstrosity in all its forms by covering over both lively and destructive connections. They bury once-vibrant rivers under urban concrete; radiation particles settle nurtured flourishing in the warmth of growing bodies.  It obscures increasing inequalities beneath discourses of freedom and personal response-ability. Somehow, in the midst of these ruins, the children and I walk with earthly assemblages, rocks, dust, radiation, water and porous bodies maintaining curiosity, noticing the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying. The geo-storying of assemblages with ethnographic attentiveness – products of the modernist, capitalist projects -offer starting points for such curiosity, along with vernacular and indigenous knowledge practices and approaches. Such curiosity means working against singular notions of modernity. As we walk, I memorise the many question that situate themselves in my body – I want to revisit these later. As we are walking, I ask one of the children to explain to me what the large steel piping is that I see weaving its way through the streets we walk.

‘That is the hot water’ Yuliya tells me, ‘inside the pipe is very hot steaming water that warms out houses. Once the pipe burst and people were burnt badly. I have seen hot steaming water flood down the street, and I had to jump out of the way. It melted holes in the snow’. 

How can we repurpose the tools of modernity against the terrors of progress to make visible the other worlds it has ignored and damaged? Living in a time of planetary catastrophe thus begins with practices of humility and difficulties: noticing the worlds around us. Our monsters and ghosts help us notice landscapes of entanglement, bodies with other bodies, time with other times (Tsing et. al 2017). The Kazakh government struggles to balance its desire to be seen as a country that is anti-nuclear, yet it has some of the largest uranium mining sites in the world. The pull and desires of economic security while worlding with others as victims of colonial exploitation. A UNICEF colleague tells me,

“The reason the government wants to erase this issue of the past radiation is because Kazakhstan wants to sell more uranium to the global marketplace. We have plenty of uranium here. We are not allowed to sell much, there are certain limits.”

But what is the scale of time, time scales in radiated worlds?

“When the cascading energies of the nuclei that were split in an atomic bomb explosion live on in the interior and exterior of collective and individual bodies resetting decay times of cellular clocks, how can anything like a fixed, singular, and external notion of time retain its relevance or even its meaning?”  (Barad, 2017  p. 63).

Walking with children seduces me into these temporal diffractive possibilities Plutonium-239, has a 25,000 year half-life.

In a flash, past bodies living in the immediate vicinity of the Polygon the site of over 450 atomic bomb detonations ingest radioactive isotopes that indefinitely rework body molecules, all the while manufacturing future cancers, like little time bombs (Barad 2017a) walking with children is to be waiting with bombs to go off.  What constitutes the event of an atomic bomb that explodes at one moment then over time continues to go off in bodies of kin?

Barads paper Troubling Time/s and ecologies of nothingness engages with my thoughts her words resonate over and over in my thinking; she walks with us.  “The temporality of radiation exposure is not one of immediacy; or rather, it reworks this notion” which must then “rework calculations of how to understand what comes before and after, while thinking generationally” (Barad 2017a, p. 63). Barad’s thinking sings in my thoughts as I re-turn to her paper running it over and over, attending to the liveliness of radiation and how it disrupts all concepts of time and temporality: “…radioactivity inhabits time-beings and resynchronises and reconfigures temporalities/ spacetimematterings” (Barad 2017a, p. 63). Walking with children on/through radiated landscapes, time is this messy entangled space is unstable, “Radioactive decay elongates, disperses, and exponentially frays time’s coherence” time in this walking-with children is always in the process of “leaking away from itself” (Barad 2017a, p 63).

Plutonium, a heavy metal, emits alpha radiation, and the material is most harmful when inhaled or ingested. There are ‘hot sites’ where residual radiation is still present in the earth. On the testing site scientists find high levels of plutonium in horse bones – Kazakh shepherds use these bones to make soup. Horse soup and horse milk flows warmly on cold nights through small bodies. Aytem stops walking to introduce me to his neighbour. A kindly older woman who works at the local fruit shop.

‘She is my friend, she is old, but she often makes me Kumis (fermented horse milk) to help me sleep’. Aytem lives in the 10^th floor of an apartment block. In later workshops he brings a photograph looking form his apartment window, He never leaves the apartment when his parents aren’t there to play alone, he worries about the dirt and dust in the playground. He said it scares him he might become sick. He arrives to the workshops and when we walk today in a neatly pressed formal suit. He tells me his parents have told him it is important to use this opportunity to give his point of view because we are important government people. He speaks often and with confidence. 

Karin Murris (2013) nudges me to consider these injustices, epistemic injustices are not just social, but also within this ontoepistemic are quiet moments.  Children are not listened to because of their very being (onto); as child unable to make claims to knowledge, because it is,  “assumed that they are (still) developing, (still) innocent, (still) fragile, (still) immature, (still) irrational (still) becoming” (Murris, 2018, p.2) – (still) monsters. Did I say children are monsters?  No, it is the mutated radiated microbiomes that inhabit the deep corners of their porous beings I am afraid of. Who are these entangled monstrous beings?

Walking-with children those who are deemed unworthy of recognition and are invisible in the anthro-obscene manifestations of western capitalism. Here is to walk into the past with ghosts and to share the horrors of a dystopian future. Hide it, don’t show the world, this never happened. Queering with diffractive theorising as speculative fabulations the practice of walking-with the past, present and the future is to recognise the complexity of spacetimemattering. An entangled set of possibilities are revealed through the invoking of an alternative set of stories conjured up with children through being-in-place with a host of other re-configuring relations. Are you still walking with me? Who are your adult researcher body from across the oceans claiming to know how it feels to be an earth-child body, to be a container for generations of radiation trauma?

As with the sufferings of residents of the former plutonium-manufacturing districts of Russia, Australia and the USA – where radioactive traces still course through soil and water bodies, the porous bodies of the children I am walking with in Semipalatinsk are suffused with illness and unease. Childbodies medicalised, labelled, scanned, cleared of traces relating to illnesses from the past plutonium exposure.  But deep between the surface chronic doses of radiation are stimulating bacterial mutations. It seems many children suffer from the ills of their monstrous sympoietic relations with disrupted microbial companions (Haraway 2017, McFall-Ngai, 2017). Monsters are the wonders of sympoiesis, threats of ecological disruption, virulent new pathogens to out-of-control chemical processes.

Children walking with “symbiotic relations must be constantly renewed and negotiated within life’s entanglements. When conditions suddenly shift, once life-sustaining relations sometimes turn deadly” (Tsing et. al 2017, M5). Donna whispers to me ‘To be one is always to become with many’ (Haraway 2016).  “Symbioses are vulnerable; the fate of one species changes a whole ecosystem” (Tsing et. al 2017, M5).

Jars of deformed dead bodies are contained in a local museum. The children of our study tell me they have seen these ‘bodies’ penetrated by monstrous matter. Like the tumorous dogs we see while walking, these silenced bodies floating in fluid over time “provoke fear but also fascination as their ghostly presence, same but not quite threatens to reposition or dissolve the boundaries of normality”. (Goodley et al., 2015, p. 3)

“The killing of ‘monstrous’ babies born with ‘deformities’ has been traced back as far as the time of Aristotle’ and ‘In more recent times, monstrosity was the justification for the “euthanasia programmes” that systematically killed hundreds of thousands of disabled children”. (Goodley et al. 2015, p. 2)

In these precarious times it continues to be important to consider an approach that seeks to de-centre the human; to be attentive to the re-doing of material configurations and spacetimemattering. The past, the present and the future are always being reworked.  This is ethical work. (Barad interviewed by Dolphijn, and van der Tuin, 2009). According to van der Tuin (2014) Feminist new relational materialist models, like the ones described by Barad “scramble conventional notions of subjectivity that separate the rational human from an external environment” (pp.232-3).  Theorizing using Barad’s agential realism means moving beyond posthumanism which can be seen lacking in matters of ethics:

“… questions of ethics and of justice are always already threaded through the very fabric of the world. They are not an additional concern that gets added on or placed in our field of vision now and again by particular kinds of concern. Being is threaded through with mattering. Epistemology, ontology, and ethics are inseparable. Matters of fact, matters of concern, and matters of care are shot through with one another. Or to put it in yet another way: matter and meaning cannot be severed. In my agential realist account, matter is a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming” (Barad interviewed by Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2009, p. 69).

As I am walking-with children they comment:

 ‘We are afraid of the street dogs. Dead dogs stink’. Deformed babies deformed dogs; Dead dogs’ dead babies.  ‘Do you know about the nuclear tests?’ they ask as we walk. ‘Yes, I say I did know’. ‘It is inside us’, one child remarks, ‘it is probably in you now’.

I blow my nose, we walk on. 

References

Barad, K. (2017a) Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable, New Formations, 92, (Special issue  Posthuman Temporalities), 10.3898/NEWF:92.05.2017

Barad, K. (2017b), No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds Ecologies of Nothingness and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering, in Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gans, E., and Bubandt, N. (eds) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press, USA. pp. G103-M120.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2017), Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble, in Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gans, E., and Bubandt, N. (eds) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press, USA. pp. M25-M50.

Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2009). Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad. Viewed 2 June 2016. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001

Goodley, D., Runswick-Cole, K., & Liddiard, K. (2015). The DisHuman Child. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1075731.

McFall-Ngai, M.,(2017), Noticing Microbial Worlds: The Postmodern Synthesis in Biology,, in Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gans, E., and Bubandt, N. (eds) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press, USA. pp. M51-M70.

Murris, K. (2013) The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Children’s Voices, Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), pp. 245-259.

Murris, K. (2018). Posthuman Child and Diffractive Teacher: Decolonizing the Nature/Culture Binary, in Cutter-Mackenzie A., Malone K., Barratt Hacking E. (eds) Research Handbook on Childhoodnature. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham.

Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gans, E., and Bubandt, N. (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press, USA.

Van der Tuin, I. (2014). Diffraction as Methodology as Feminist Onto-epistemology: On encountering Chantal and Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation. Parallax, 20(3), 231–244.

Wuthnow, J. (2002) Deleuze in the postcolonial: On nomads and indigenous politics, Feminist Theory, 3 (2), p. 183-200.

 

This blog post has been reproduced from a panel paper presented at AERA , Toronto, Canada, 2019 and emerges form studies of the Bodies on Damaged Landscapes a theme of the Children in the Anthropocene Project. 

Panel Title: Storying land, consent, and radical relationality as practices of walking-with.

The 4 papers convened for this session foreground the ways that story and walking are intimately connected to critical place-making. The papers activate place as vital and relational through a practice of walking-with. Walking-with is a deliberate strategy of unlearning and unsettling as place-making. Walking-with is responsive to stories of land, and different ethical modes of participation that are situated and relational. Drawing from queer theory, Indigenous knowledges, critical place inquiry, critical race theory, papers on the panel discuss 4 separate walking projects that understand place as intimate, sentient, and vital.

The Panel Session Submission was for Division B and Chaired by Stephanie Springgay.

Nothing epitomizes the precarious nature of the planet for me, then the view as you fly from the high mountain plateaus of the Altiplano towards the El Alto airport and see spread out in front of you the immense sprawling valley where the city of La Paz is perilously situated. The image of a vastness of crowded slum communities perched on the high reaches of the escarpment and spilling down into the steep, treeless, ravines and gorges of the valley are breath taking. The Anthropocene, a human imprint at a global-scale. A fragility of children and their nonhuman companions engaged in a dance of daily survival with shared vulnerability. The unsettling that the naming of the Anthropocene has administered – and will continue to administer – is a massive jolt to our collective imagination of ourselves. the irony we as a species, amongst others, find ourselves: both as the monster and maker. The concept of the Anthropocene assumes a generalized anthropos, whereby all humans and nonhumans are equally implicated and all equally affected. Through my research I seek to bring attention to the way the environmental crisis accentuates rather than diminishes differences between the privileged and the not so privileged. Because we are not all in the Anthropocene together, the children are far more in it than others. Wealthy humans have cultivated a global landscape of inequality in which they find their advantages multiplied in these highly fragile times. Philosophically, it is a concept that works both for us and on us. In its unsettlement of the entrenched binaries of modernity (nature/culture; object /subject), and its provocative alienation of familiar anthropocentric scales and times, it opens up a number of possibilities for exploring concepts such as assemblages, relations and kin. The research project Children in the Anthropocene is premised on the import of making kin, the ‘situatedness’ of being child relative to, and combined with ‘other’ kin. That we are all beings in common, entangled, sharing ecologically our posthumanist selves.

Stories that Matter
Throughout the past 20 years I have listened intently to children’s stories by noticing and paying attention to their experiences of growing up in relation with others (human and non-human). The research was both ethnographic and participatory in its methodology. To be responsive, place-based participatory research engaged by the researcher with children is attentive to noticing the fine grain differences and similarities, it seeks to encourage complexity rather than simplicity. When engaging with children in precarious environments this responsiveness supports opportunities for children from a variety of ages and genders, diverse lives, interests and experiences to take up and make choices of their responses to the possibilities that exist to engage with the research.

Children I researched with on the higher reaches of the valley of La Paz were aged between 5 and 15 years old. They volunteered to be co-researchers using visual, oral and mobile place-based research activities including photography, interviews, focus groups, drawings, mapping and walking interviews. The project focused on incorporating a research perspective through their everyday experiences of being curious, creative and playful in their place so supporting a range of possibilities for children to document relational encounters. For some communities in La Paz the children’s research workshop included opportunities for families to be involved. Parents or grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins especially in the beginning, came along to watch, ask questions and even help out. Ethical considerations of negotiating children involvement meant working in outreach children’s centres in the community where months in advance social work students had provided information workshops and small meetings for children and their parents. As a feminist onto-ethnographer, I have also inserted myself in the research studies by documenting my experiences through a field diary, photographs and videos.

Theoretically, I have adopted an onto-epistemological research stance that assumes epistemology and ontology are mutually implicated ‘because we are of the world’, not standing outside of it. The theory of ecological posthumanism I have adopted contests the arrogance of anthropocentric/humanistic approaches, by enabling a multiplicity of ecologies where humans are neither exempt or exceptional, we are all beings in common. By adopting a stance of vital new materiality, I have sought to acknowledge the aliveness of matter; that it is always more than mere matter: it is active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable. I have employed the theoretical device of ‘intra-action’ and ‘diffraction’ as used in new rmaterialism to support the documenting of the messy, heterogeneous relations between children and their nonhuman world. By enacting a posthumanist and new materialist reading of the Children in Anthropocene project, I have shifted away from the child as the central object of my gaze. I am being attentive to and noticing the non-human entities through which the children’s world is being encountered, where relational entanglement with material matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. I am attuning to matter, where all of it matters.

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with;
It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with;
It matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties.
It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories (Donna Haraway, 2011, p. 4)

We have much to learn from children about their everyday encounters with the humans and nonhumans they co-inhabit cities with. Emerging as an assemblage of naturecultures their stories are stories that matter, they are located at a range of times, enmeshed in complex spaces and are deeply vital at a molecular level. By sharing an imagined future, that supports an ecological posthumanist collective and senses the value of considering others as kin and beings in common, children have much to contribute in our shared stories of the Anthropocene. After all they have the most to lose, if we do nothing.

References
Haraway, D 2011, SF: science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far’, viewed 30 January 2014, <http://people.ucsc.edu/~haraway/Files/PilgrimAcceptanceHaraway.pdf&gt;.

‘If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively…. We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all’ (Val Plumwood 2007:1)

Cities are central sites for reconfiguring, reimagining human-nature encounters in the Anthropocene. The city constitutes a powerful imaginary of the human-nature disconnect and therefore brings credence and attention to our seemingly de-natured lives. Cities represent the effects of the human dominance over ‘nature’; humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of the natural world. Keeping nature out.

Earlier in my research I remember writing about ‘urban sustainability’ as having the potential to disrupt the nature-culture divide, by offering up visions of a ‘balance’, how humans and non-humans could co-exist in eco/green/biophilic/cities. Guided by theories of biophilia, my designs of an imagined eco-green cities were based on the hypothesis that humans (and particularly children) possessed an innate desire to seek close relations with nature and other forms of life, and if only we could ‘let’ nature back into cities we could nurture this desire. Humans, (especially children) in this biophilic world, could be re-constituted, re-inserted with and re-embedded as a significant other in the natural world. Biophilic cities would be abundant with ‘nature’; cities could be places where humans nurtured protected, restored and grew nature. Children could play, find refuge and develop kin relations. They would look different; the presence of an abundance of plants, would foster deep connections and daily contact between the humans and the non-human world. Such aspirations of a natured urban sustainability have been increasingly augmented, or framed within neo-liberal agenda of sustainability, by notions of ‘resilient cities’ ‘livable cities’, ‘healthy cities’, ‘sustainable cities’ and claimed through human ingenuity  ‘human smartness’, in which human agency became at best assertive, reactive, or even dissolved within a process of recursive co-adaptation. My growing suspicion of the restorative value of this anthropocentric environmentalism informing an urban sustainability movement (of which biophilic theories were deeply located) was based on its seemingly limited and narrow conception that nature was (only) of value because of its ‘material and commodity benefits’ for humans (Kellert & Wilson 1993). And we ‘humans’ although valuing the potential of nature for our own health and longevity as a species, weren’t nature. Around the world big actions, by corporate companies to build shining examples of ‘green’ skyscrapers in high income nations didn’t fit well with my experiences of children thrown-together in the messy, dirty and untamed environments of slums. The places where we know the majority of the world actually resides.

As I came to spend more time with children in these ‘brown’ communities, I was critically aware of the limitations of western centric definitions of deep ecology, environmentalism and gaia-ism that felt to intensify the cartesian divide of nature-culture and produce a sanitised view of nature controlled once again solely for the benefit of the human species. Then I read Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway.  In a passage in chapter 2 she unpacks Isabelle Stengers work on the intrusion of Gaia from her writings Au temps des catastrophes (2009) and the relation of Gaia to Chaos (see Priogogine and Stengers 1984), Haraway concludes with:

Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet. Gaia’s intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects multitudes. This intrusion threatens not earth itself – microbes will adapt, to put it mildly – but threatens the liveability of earth for vast kinds., species, assemblages, and individuals in an ‘event’ already underway called the Sixth Great Extinction. (Haraway, 2016, p. 43)

Gaia theory for example when first proposed in the mid-seventies by James Lovelock described the planet and all its cohabitants including the environment as acting as a single, unified, self-regulating system. This system included the near-surface rocks, the soil, and the atmosphere. This theory then evolved to present the role of humans as a keystone species whose role was accomplish a global homeostasis. Ecosystems are huge and complex. They contain networks of animals, plants, fungi, and various microorganisms. All of these lifeforms interact and affect one another.  Having some form of equilibrium, this balance, was the focus of a green biophilic cities through sustainable development. But even Lovelock who dreamed the gaian vision of a harmonious world has been documented as saying greening our cities is far too late now to have any long time value.  In a speech to the Royal Society, on 29 October 2007, Lovelock finished with:

Perhaps the saddest thing is that if we fail Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct but in human civilization the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are through our intelligence and communication the planetary equivalent of a nervous system. We should be the heart and mind of the Earth not its malady. Perhaps the greatest value of the Gaia concept lies in its metaphor of a living Earth, which reminds us that we are part of it and that our contract with Gaia is not about human rights alone, but includes human obligations (retrieved http://www.jameslovelock.org/page24.html)

In the posthuman world of new materialism, actor-network theory and posthumanism many theorists posit that creativity and agency will still exist, but that they will no longer be the property of humans alone (Chandler 2013).  Rather agency, and this case children’s agency to respond to the environmental crisis will become a product of the assemblages, associations and relationships through which they are connected and attached to the more-than-human world. By moving away from an explanation of children’s environmental encounters from a humanist perspective where we: “…understand and act in the world on the basis of our separation from it – articulated in the constraining, alienating and resentment-filled modernists divides of human/nature, subject/object, culture, environment”, a posthumanist approach allows a consideration of how we, ‘should develop our understandings around our attachment to the world’ (Chandler 2013: 516). That is,

To respond to the big picture challenges of sustainability… twenty-first century children need relational and collective dispositions, not individualistic ones, to equip them to live within the kind of world they have inherited …They will need a firm sense of shared belonging and shared responsibility …  They will need to build upon a foundational sense of connectivity to this same natureculture collective (Taylor 2013, p.118).

Entangled nature in La Paz

The children in the neighbourhoods high on the El Alto have tremendous views across the valley all the way to Mount Illimani. Mount Illimani is the highest mountain in the Cordillera Real, a sub range of the Andes and stands at 6,438 metres above sea level. It lays south of La Paz at the eastern edge of the Altiplano. With its snowed capped summit visible from across the city of La Paz it acts as a significant landmark and its connection to the lives of the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding countryside is deeply entrenched in Bolivian heritage and culture. Bolivia is a landlocked country separated from the Pacific Ocean by Chile. Bolivia had a coastline, but its former coastline is now Chilean territory.  The Bolivian terrain includes the rugged Andes Mountains that includes a highland plateau where La Paz and Lake Titicaca (the world’s highest navigable lake) are located. There are also the rolling hills, large expansive rivers that flow into the lowland plains of the Amazon Basin. Some of the major environmental issues for the country include the clearing of land for agricultural purposes and international demand for tropical timber, both of which are contributing to deforestation, soil erosion, desertification, loss of biodiversity, and industrial pollution of water supplies used for drinking and irrigation. The city of La Paz is located in west-central Bolivia, 42 miles (68km) southeast of Lake Titicaca and is at an elevation of between 10,650 and 13,250 feet (3250 and 4100 metres) above sea level. This makes it the highest national capital city in the world.  La Paz is near the famous mountains including the Illimani (guardian of La Paz), Huayna Potosi, Mururata, and Illampu. On the western side of the Altiplano divide, about an hour to the west of the La Paz, is the site of the tallest mountain in Bolivia and ninth tallest mountain in the Andes, the Sajama Volcano.

The Pachamama influences children’s worldview in La Paz, it is one where the earth deserves and is provided with the same ethical and political considerations as humans. Children’s encounters with the shared ecologies of the mountain are central to their stories of living and being with other entities in the city. The majority of children of the slums of La Paz although living in a very altered environment were deeply embedded in the potential of intra-acting with the natural environment. This was not an imagined romantic nature, a wooded forest with birds and butterflies; but a difficult, dirty, gritty world of living with others through shared material matter. For the boys especially, adventures into the hill top forests are an important part of their play activities even though it can be dangerous. Girls have less freedom and tend to be limited to engaging with the trees in gardens close to their homes. The shared encounters of Mount Illimani and its impact on all children’s sense of connection to place are very unique. This aesthetic openness to the mountains, the clouds, the weather drew them into a oneness, yet it wasn’t a sense of wonder of nature as ‘extraordinary’, is was of being one with the world, being entangled in shared ecologies of the everyday. The image is from Fernando aged 11 from Munaypata.  He describes his drawing to me: ‘I like to see my area green. I am inside in this picture. I don’t go out by myself. I go out on weekends. I like to walk. I don’t like cars. I like everything that is natural. I like rainbows, when I went to Copacabana I liked seeing rainbows. I like walking through the woods because it is like a jungle’.

Children in La Paz are deeply entangled in a relation with their natural world.  This is not just a worldly present relation but a deeply entrenched history of reverence and respect for nature and the earth that has evolved through their indigenous spiritual beliefs of the Pachamama. (Pachma meaning ‘cosmos’ and mama meaning ‘mother’). In the indigenous philosophy of the Andean people, the Pachamama is a goddess. She is Mother Earth. She sustains life on earth. Water, Earth, Sun, and Moon are Mother Earth’s four Quechuan cosmological entities.  When I was staying in La Paz the local newspaper had a quote from the Foreign Minister about the new law on the rights of Mother Nature. I asked my colleague to translate. Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values.  Bolivia has passed the world’s first law to grant eleven new rights for nature. Mother Earth is described in the law as ‘a dynamic living system comprising an indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny’ (Bolivian Legislative Assembly 2011, p.2). The Law of the rights of Mother Earth includes the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities (Bolivian Legislative Assembly 2011).

Bolivia will struggle, like many countries, to cope with rising temperatures, melting glaciers and more extreme weather events including more frequent floods, droughts, frosts and mudslides, that are often outside of their control. The steady rising of temperatures we are experiencing now (which has no borders) and which continues to accelerate could turn much of Bolivia into a desert. Glaciers in Bolivia below 5,000m, for example, are expected to disappear by 2030, leaving Bolivia with a much smaller ice cap. Scientists say this will lead to a crisis in farming and water shortages in cities such as La Paz and El Alto.

Childhood Ecologies

Children’s encounters and relations with the environment influence their lives. They are central to their stories of living and being in their cities. The majority of children growing up in the slums of La Paz although in a built very altered environment were deeply embedded in the potential of intra-acting with the natural environment.  The encounters with Mount Illimani and its impact on their sense of connection to place are very unique. Children shared photographs from their viewing point, a place where they would go to be with the mountain, especially at sunset. I sense they know the mountain as kin, as part of their being child in this collective of eclectic ecologies. In the practices of walking with children within these entangled worlds, we notice and attune to the damaged landscapes of the Anthropocene.

By shifting away from the child in nature as the only agential body and focusing on the materiality of child bodies and the bodies of other non-human entities as relational assemblages allows a new ethical imagining for children and their encounters with place and nature. In my research I have sought to reframe the importance of children’s childhood experiences as central to their role as collective agents with other beings in reconfiguring a potential beyond the current sustainable green cities of a neo-liberal white middle class politics. Like the findings of Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2015), children’s sharing of their ideas about nature is an acknowledgement that:

…learning through encounters with other species is not always harmonious and pleasant, is not always equal, and does not offer us “moral certitudes or simple escape routes” from the mess we are in (p. 20).

The potential to extend ‘ecology’ beyond a hierarchical anthropomorphic structure to “uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances” (Bennett 2010: 113). This opening up (beyond anthropomorphism) allows opportunities for the nature/culture divide to be reconsidered as ‘ecological collective’ – containing active agents of human and nonhuman elements. For educators, it allows openings for posthuman pedagogies that consider relations between material objects to be reassigned as a ‘vital (vibrant) kinship’ between the human and nonhuman (Bennett 2010). Such an approach therefore may lay the foundations for a recasting of learning about sustainability. For others involved in city planning or childhood support services, it encourages them to be attentive to, notice and acknowledge rather than dismiss the means through which children are encountering nature in their everyday lives.  Supporting difference and complexity within child-nature relations by supporting a posthumanist approach to addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene, I have argued in my recent work on Children in the Anthropocene is central to supporting posthumanist ecological communities.

References

Bennett, J. 2010, Vibrant matter. A political ecology of things, Duke University Press, Durham.

Bolivian [Plurinational] Legislative Assembly 2011, The Act of the rights of Mother Earth, viewed 3 May 2016, .

Chandler, D. 2013, The World of Attachment? The Post-humanist Challenge to Freedom and Necessity, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 41, 3, 516-534. 

Haraway, D. 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham

Kellert, S & Wilson, E.O. (eds)1993, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Island Press: Washington.

Plumwood , V. . 2007, A review of Deborah Bird Rose’s Reports from a wild country: Ethics of decolonisation. Australian Humanities Review 42, August, p. 1 – 4

Taylor, A. 2013. Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxon & London: Routledge.

Taylor, A & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. 2015, Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 507-529, doi: 10.1080/14681366.2015.1039050.

This blog post is an extract from the chapter Ecologies: Entangled Nature from my current Palgrave book: Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking Sustainability and the Child Friendliness of Cities.